About 'Fogwalking' & Jonathan

Start at the beginning.

I was born and raised around Teesside & North Yorkshire. My ‘beginning’ was December 1961, around 5.45am (loved the dawn ever since – I’m a ‘lark’.) Ma and Pa Brown were lovely, kind middle-class ‘60’s parents. They taught me the importance of politeness, courtesy, honesty, respect, truth….and being 5 minutes early is on time.

An aunt gave me my first camera at 12. At 14 a great uncle told me I had a good eye; he drove a Rolls and ran a studio – career motivation for a teenager. My 6th form art teacher taught me how to use a darkroom, and how to play ‘Smoke On The Water’….only one of these things has proved useful.

Despite my protestations, I ended up studying engineering at Newcastle Polytechnic. That went well - failed miserably. As soon as I left, I started working for a local studio as an assistant. My first boss after college taught me how to shoot a wedding old school, with 60 frames of film and a Rolleiflex; ”and get it right first time, or you're bloody sacked!” I learnt my trade at the ‘coalface’.

I’m still in Newcastle and I’m now my own boss. For almost 20 years I’ve run a successful commercial photography business. But, that world has become stale and boring.  So, I want a new challenge; I now want to focus on curating and creating my own images.

My desire comes, in part, from my being one of a dwindling group of photographers who were trained and worked in the purely analogue arena, before transitioning to the democratising digital image-making world we find ourselves in today.

Since the dawn of ‘Box Brownie’ digital ‘phone photography, photographic image making has lost its’ magic; the way a photograph used to transport you into another way of seeing.

I want people to realise that more is not necessarily better. Look, and I mean REALLY LOOK, at images, and see if they absolutely do create an atmosphere and a vision of that scene that no one else saw. In other words, see the photograph as a piece of art, not just a record of what everyone else can see.

Working with film taught me the discipline of ‘getting it right in camera’, along with an understanding of the limited manipulations available within the darkroom environment.

Since transferring to digital capture, I have kept to the rigorous disciplines instilled in me by my previous analogue ‘life’. I still aim to capture the image I see in my head in the camera, and only utilise the digital tools available to me in a way that mimics the way I worked in the darkroom.

In working this way, I hope to stay true to my mind’s eye, to truly capture what I ‘saw’ in the original scene.

I’m largely self-taught, using visual resources to guide me. I’ve relied on the visual stimulus of painters and other photographers to guide my education. Amongst others, these include Turner, Martin, Bailey, McCullin, Adams, H C-B, Capa and Parr. Not sure what this crucible of knowledge has taught me? I work in pictures, not words. I hope my photographs say more about me than any words I can use.